Santa Fe Opera Season Hits Some High Notes

August 22, 1985|By John von Rhein, Music critic.

Nobody ever could accuse John Crosby of taking the easy way out, operatically speaking.

The adventuresome founder/director of the Santa Fe Opera, which just concluded its 29th season, mixes unusual repertory in such a way that the esoteric comes out sounding familiar, the far-out far-in. The absence of

``Bohemes`` and ``Traviatas`` may not do much for the tourist trade, but it decidedly has kept connoisseurs, critics and curiosity-seekers returning each summer to the spectacular opera amphitheater in the Sangre de Cristo foothills of northern New Mexico.

This year, Crosby and company played host to a typical SFO mix of challenging and ambitious opera. There was the world premiere of ``The Tempest`` with music by Indiana University faculty composer John Eaton, and libretto by critic Andrew Porter (after Shakespeare`s play). There were the first American performances of ``The English Cat,`` Hans Werner Henze`s satiric tragicomedy to words by Edward Bond. And there were revivals of Richard Strauss` ``Die Liebe der Danae,`` first given here in 1982; and Offenbach`s ``Orpheus in the Underworld,`` which production dates from 1983.

Not a warhorse in the bunch.

One had to admire all the high-minded intentions that went into this operatic ``Tempest.`` Porter artfully cut, pasted, transposed and condensed the Shakespearean verses, simplifying motivations and sharpening character focus. Conductor Richard Bradshaw sorted out the complex and disparate musical impulses with obvious dedication. Bliss Hebert fluidly staged the 3 1/4-hour opus within the fantastical grotto that designer Allen Charles Klein envisioned as Prospero`s island. Craig Miller`s lighting and Chicago composer Howard Sandroff`s electronic sound effects lent evocative touches. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, Eaton (perhaps best known for his brutally powerful opera

``The Cry of Clytaemnestra``) succeeds only in brutalizing the Bard. This most musical of Shakespeare`s plays is grafted to jagged vocal lines that fall awkwardly in the uppermost reaches of the singers` ranges; dense orchestral writing that writhes in microtonal intervals; and clever but badly integrated pastiches of jazz and electronic and Renaissance styles. You are lucky if you can catch 10 percent of the words over the churning orchestral racket.

The preponderance of grim harmonic dissonance makes the score tedious to listen to over the long haul, and the utter lack of dramatic shaping or stylistic unity negates several momentarily striking pages. Like so many intellectual opera composers, Eaton has written music that only his academic peers really can grasp, much less enjoy. Is ``cerebral`` opera antithetical to effective, absorbing music theater? In the case of Eaton`s ``Tempest,`` alas, the answer has to be yes.

Under the circumstances, the large cast must be awarded medals of musical valor. Timothy Noble as the magician Prospero guided the stage action with noble authority from his space-bubble aerie. Sally Wolf as Miranda and Colenton Freeman as Ferdinand coped as best they could with Eaton`s vertiginous notions of love music. Susan Quittmeyer as Ariel sang sweetly while sporting strings of Christmas tree lights, her darting movements cleverly mirrored by mime doubles.

Prime honors for unembarrassed bravura went, however, to Ann Howard`s drunken Caliban, unrecognizable in a padded monkey suit, monstrously amusing in her jazzy-bluesy vocal flights. Not exactly such stuff as dreams are made on, but a one-woman oasis of fun nevertheless amid an otherwise arid evening in the theater.

``The English Cat`` is the fifth Henze opera to be produced in Santa Fe. It is reminiscent, both musically and dramatically, of Henze`s 1965 comic opera, ``Der Junge Lord.`` The identities of animals and people are purposely confused--so much the better to attack the forced propriety, as well as the underlying greed and corruption, of 19th-Century English society. The composer and his librettist, Edward Bond, draw their inspiration from a Balzac story and Grandville drawings. Any resemblance to a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber is purely coincidental.

The basic trouble with ``English Cat`` is that the story is a fable, and fables only work on the lyric stage when told with the utmost brevity. Henze and Bond have fashioned their opera with ponderous disregard for the clock;

``English Cat`` requires three hours to make its point, which, essentially, is that society is rotten. (What a revelation!) By that time one`s attention has long since wandered, despite the sporadic pleasures of Henze`s wildly eclectic score, a ``number opera`` stew of mock-Victorian ballads, Latin rhythms, neoclassic noodling, sweet atonality, sour tonality and other musical found-objects, knowingly stirred by George Manahan.